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John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

We had a chance to sit down and do a Google Plus hangout with Dan Riskin, MD, CEO and co-founder of Health Fidelity to discuss the challenges of EHR today and how we can reach the real benefits of EHR adoption. We had a great discussion about how the industry is so caught up just getting the data in the EHR software that we’re missing out on the opportunity to get the benefits of actually using the EHR data.

For some reason the Google hangout audio and video didn’t sink right (welcome to the cutting edge of technology), but the audio is good. Just start up the video below and enjoy listening to it like a podcast or radio show. I expect that’s what most of you do anyway with our videos.

James Ritchie is a freelance writer with a focus on health care. His experience includes eight years as a staff writer with the Cincinnati Business Courier, part of the American City Business Journals network. Twitter @HCwriterJames.

I recently wrote that it’s not clear whether patient portals do much to improve health care.

Now a new study suggests they help in at least one area: medication adherence.

The research involved diabetic patients who were using cholesterol-lowering statin drugs and had registered for online portal access. Among those who started using the system’s online refill function as their only method of getting the medication, “nonadherence” dropped 6 percent.

LDL or “bad” cholesterol also decreased.

The researchers concluded that “wider adoption of online refills may improve adherence.” No decline in nonadherence was seen in patients who didn’t use the online refill function.

The Kaiser Permanente study was published in the journal Medical Care.

The study included plenty of subjects — 8,705 people who used online refills and 9,055 who didn’t. But if there’s a cause-effect relationship at work in this study, you have to wonder in which direction it might run. Might the people who tend to take their medicine as prescribed be more likely to sign up for online refills in the first place?

Still, the study is an intriguing hint that patient portals might be worth at least some of the attention they’re getting. Nonadherence to medication regimens is a huge issue for health care because of both the human toll it takes and the inefficiency it fosters in the system.

Typical nonadherence rates are in the 30-60 percent range, depending on the condition, the medication and other factors, according to Medscape. It’s especially easy to slack off when symptoms disappear.

The study builds on another piece of good news for health IT. Researchers recently found that EMRs can make diabetes care better by rendering care coordination more efficient, as Katherine Rourke wrote here at EMR and HIPAA.

Portals are, of course, experiencing tremendous popularity because they help health care providers to meet Meaningful Use Stage 2 patient-engagement requirements. But, as I wrote earlier, in a review of 46 studies related to portals, researchers didn’t find evidence for much in the way of patient benefits.

Physicians have a major job ahead of them if they’re to make full use of patient portals and receive the available federal incentives. Perhaps this study, modest as its results are, suggests that their efforts will have some benefit for the patients they serve.

James Ritchie is a freelance writer with a focus on health care. His experience includes eight years as a staff writer with the Cincinnati Business Courier, part of the American City Business Journals network. Twitter @HCwriterJames.

There’s a new data point to add to the debate over EMR return on investment.

Norton Healthcare Inc. in Louisville, Ky., has experienced a $12 million increase in federal reimbursement since it started using Epic, Louisville Business First reported. The health system, which operates five hospitals and a network of outpatient sites, is three years into a five-year, $200 million implementation.

Sounds like the beginning of some pretty good ROI. Or does it?

It’s hard to say.

ROI for records systems is notoriously hard to pin down. The word is that many hospitals don’t even try. And they might be onto something.

A revenue boost is a good sign. It’s often a result of improved coding and lower claims denial rates, as Colin Konschak of health care consulting firm Divurgent and Garrett Blair of Norfolk, Va.-based health system Sentara Healthcare recently wrote. And of course, there are the federal incentives for using an EMR — for hospitals, as much as $11 million over four years.

There’s also the rise in productivity that EMRs are expected to cause. At first, an EMR can slow down clinicians’ workflow and cost them and their organization money. But in time, the system could increase productivity.

But revenue is only part of the equation. Cost savings are the more important — and harder to calculate — factor.

Here are a few ways, as described by Konschak and Blair, that EMRs can help hospitals to save:

Less need for transcription.

Reduced use of staff time for copying and filing.

Reduced — often by 50-70 percent — use of preprinted forms.

Potentially lower malpractice premiums because of more complete documentation.

Many other potential benefits are probably real but are even less straightforward to measure. Features such as clinical decision support and electronic medical administration records, for example, could lead to reductions in medical errors — the types of mistakes the federal government no longer pays for. But measuring the money you saved from the errors you didn’t make is fairly abstract.

Many hospitals do little if anything to measure the return on their EMR investment, according to a study released by Beacon Partners last year. Healthcare Scene’s John Lynn wrote a few months ago that CIOs likely view the systems as a “necessary requirement of being a hospital today,” somewhat like cleaning supplies. So they don’t see the need to measure ROI.

To me, the “investment” part of ROI suggests that you have a choice. You put money into something now with the hope — but no guarantee — of a payoff later.

Building an imaging center on the edge of town or buying a surgical robot would probably be considered investments. Maintaining your buildings or upgrading your phones would not.

Doing something the government is making you do is not an investment. Given the reimbursement penalties that will eventually kick in for organizations that stick with paper, it’s hard to imagine that many hospital executives see EMR adoption as a matter choice.

The idea of ROI for EMR is probably outdated, a holdover from the days when having a system was optional. Hospital leaders are shopping for EMRs with an eye toward getting the best value for their money — just the way they shop for cleaning supplies, furniture or legal services.

You could say that as a society we’ve invested in the idea of EMRs and that we’re hoping for a payoff in terms of better outcomes and lower costs. But that doesn’t predict much about whether any particular hospital or doctor will see a dollar-and-cents ROI.

At Norton in Louisville, it sounds like they’re happy just to be recovering some of what they’re spending.

Katherine Rourke is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

The federally-funded study, which was done by the Western New York Beacon Community, went to one of 17 Beacon Communities funded by ONCHIT, which has handed out $250.3 million in total grants.

In this case, the Beacon Community is a partnership between HealtheLink, Catholic Medical Partners and P2 Collaborative of Western New York. The partnership’s $16.1 million is the largest grant received by any of the 17 Beacon Communities.

To study the impact of EMRs on diabetes care, the partners looked at about 40,000 patients, and 344 primary care physicians working in 98 practices.

To implement the study, participants created diabetes registries that tracked lab tests and results, created personalized reminders and guidance for patients, and generated quarterly reports for physicians underscoring areas where they could cut costs and improve diabetic care, iHealthBeat said.

But the diabetic registry was just the beginning. The Beacon project also implemented preventive telemonitoring to avoid excess emergency department visits and hospital readmissions; medication therapy tools to alert doctors — in real time — of changes ED doctors make medication regiments, and patient portals giving patients access to prescription refills, appointment requests and lab results.

At the end of the study, researchers polled the 57 practices that consistently used the registries, and found that the number of diabetics with uncontrolled sugars levels fell 4 percent, with some practices seeing as much as a 10 percent improvement. Researchers calculated that if project guidelines were followed by 20 percent of patients with diabetes and their doctors in Western New York, savings could be $18 million.

This result echoes results of other studies. For example, last year researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College concluded that when a group of community-based doctors moved to EMRs , they provided better care, particularly in managing chlamydia, diabetes, colorectal cancer and breast cancer.

James Ritchie is a freelance writer with a focus on health care. His experience includes eight years as a staff writer with the Cincinnati Business Courier, part of the American City Business Journals network. Twitter @HCwriterJames.

With system upgrades taking shape across the country, IT is no longer just another another department in the hospital. More than ever, it’s integral to how healthcare organizations work and get paid.

But you don’t always see this shifting landscape reflected in hospitals’ leadership structures or practices.

That’s unfortunate. Getting the most out of the billions being spent on health IT will require clear vision and skillful communication at the top levels, according to a December article in the Journal of the American Health Information Management Association.

Doctors, nurses and other team members “must understand the nature of the changes—what the result of the changes will be, how their roles and work will be different, and why change is important,” author Tiankai Wang wrote.

Thoughtful language can go a long way toward minimizing staff resistance and making an implementation successful, explained Wang, a professor of health information management at Texas State University.

Leaders should practice “framing” by promoting the benefits of the technology, such as improved outcomes, lower costs and greater efficiency, Wang wrote. They should also use “rhetorical crafting” by using stories, analogies and other devices to make their message resonate.

Rhetorical crafting, according to Wang, “leverages a ‘show, don’t tell’ approach to frame leaders’ message in a form that will connect more easily with staff and help them to embrace the possibilities of the coming change.”

He also advises using words such as “we” and “should” rather than “you” and “must” when talking about IT changes.

At a more fundamental level, though, IT leadership isn’t always valued in healthcare to the extent that other roles are. In 2013, average total cash compensation for chief information officers was eighth-highest of all hospital titles at about $316,000, Modern Healthcare reported.

And despite the growing importance of health IT, it’s also uncommon for hospital CIOs to be promoted to the roles of chief operating officer, president or CEO.

It does happen, though, as David Raths wrote in Healthcare Informatics. In perhaps the best known example, Cincinnati-based Mercy Health, which operates several hospitals, earlier this year named Yousuf Ahmad, who had previously served as CIO, to the chief executive role. Ahmad had also held other management roles, including president of the system’s physician group.

It’s likely a sign of the front-and-center role that IT is now taking at healthcare organizations everywhere.

Katherine Rourke is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

A group of researchers have completed a study which found new links between patients’ genetic profile and specific diseases by mining EMR data, reports a story in iHealthBeat.

The research, which was conducted by the Electronic Medical Records and Genomics Network, a consortium of medical research institutions including the Mayo Clinic and Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, analyzed data from about 13,000 of EMRs.

The participants then grouped about 15,000 billing codes contained in the EMRs into 1,600 disease categories. Next, they looked for links to diseases in EMRs which contained DNA data.

The researchers, whose study was published in the journal Nature Biotechnology, found 63 new genetic links to diseases, ranging from skin cancer to anemia, iHealthBeat said.

The EMR study method, which is known as a phenome-wide association study, is a departure from the 13-year old genome-wide association model, which has been used to search for common mutations in the DNA of patients of people with the same diseases.

Co-author Joshua Denny, a biomedical informatics researcher at Vanderbilt, says that the newer method can help link seemingly unrelated symptoms, detect potentially harmful side effects of a drug, and help find new uses for drugs.

This is just the tip of the iceberg where translation medicine and EMRs are concerned. Using EMRs to conduct genomic research is becoming an increasingly popular exercise, cutting across a wide range of clinical disciplines.

And it’s not just institutional academic research houses getting into the act. For example, this summer a large northern Virginia hospital announced that it had struck a deal with a Massachusetts analytics firm to see if data mined from EMRs can better predict the risk of preterm live birth.

Now, genomics research is not for just any hospital — it’s obviously a major undertaking — but I think it’s likely more hospitals will get into the game. By this time next year I think there will be a crop of interesting new genomics projects mining EMRs. Although, it will be interesting to see how the 23andMe FDA battle impacts this as well.

James Ritchie is a freelance writer with a focus on health care. His experience includes eight years as a staff writer with the Cincinnati Business Courier, part of the American City Business Journals network. Twitter @HCwriterJames.

Two prominent physicians this week pointed out a basic but, in the era of information as a commodity, sometimes overlooked truth about EMRs: They increase the number of people with access to your medical data thousands of times over.

She gave an example of why: Minkin, a gynecologist, once treated a patient for decreased libido. When the patient later visited a dermatologist in the Yale system, that sensitive bit of history appeared on a summary printout.

“She was outraged,” she told Journal reporter Melinda Beck. “She felt horrible that this dermatologist would know about her problem. She called us enraged for 10 or 15 minutes.”

Dr. Deborah Peel, an Austin psychiatrist and founder of the nonprofit group Patient Privacy Rights, said she’s concerned about the number of employees, vendors and others who can see patient records. Peel is a well-known privacy advocate but has been accused by some health IT leaders of scaremongering.

“What patients should be worried about is that they don’t have any control over the information,” she said. “It’s very different from the paper age where you knew where your records were. They were finite records and one person could look at them at a time.”

She added: “The kind of change in the number of people who can see and use your records is almost uncountable.”

Peel said the lack of privacy causes people to delay or avoid treatment for conditions such as cancer, depression and sexually transmitted infections.

But Dr. James Salwitz, a medical oncologist in New Jersey, said on the panel that the benefits of EMR, including greater coordination of care and reduced likelihood of medical errors, outweigh any risks.

The privacy debate doesn’t have clear answers. Paper records are, of course, not immune to being lost, stolen or mishandled.

In the case of Minkin’s patient, protests aside, it’s reasonable for each physician involved in her care to have access to the complete record. While she might not think certain parts of her history are relevant to particular doctors, spotting non-obvious connections is an astute clinician’s job. At any rate, even without an EMR, the same information might just as easily have landed with the dermatologist via fax.

That said, privacy advocates have legitimate concerns. Since it’s doubtful that healthcare will go back to paper, the best approach is to improve EMR technology and the procedures that go with it.

Plenty of work is underway.

For example, at the University of Texas at Arlington, researchers are leading a National Science Foundation project to keep healthcare data secure while ensuring that the anonymous records can be used for secondary analysis. They hope to produce groundbreaking algorithms and tools for identifying privacy leaks.

“It’s a fine line we’re walking,” Heng Huang, an associate professor at UT’s Arlington Computer Science & Engineering Department, said in a press release this month “We’re trying to preserve and protect sensitive data, but at the same time we’re trying to allow pertinent information to be read.”

When it comes to balancing technology with patient privacy, healthcare professionals will be walking a fine line for some time to come.

Katherine Rourke is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

Parents using an integrated PHR were more likely to take their young children to all recommended well-child visits, according to a Kaiser Permanente study reported in iHealthBeat.

More than 4.3 million members are registered to use Kaiser’s PHR, My Health Manager, on kp.org. During the first half of this year, patients have viewed 17.5 million lab test results, sent 7.4 million secure e-mails to their care providers, refilled 7.1 million prescriptions and scheduled 1.8 million appointments, reportsNews-Medical.

The study, which was published in The Journal of Pediatrics, analyzed data on more than 7,000 children ages zero to two living in the Northwest U.S. and Hawaii. The children were enrolled in KP health plans between January 2007 and July 2011. To determine the appropriate number of well-child visits, researchers used performance measures listed in the 2010 Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set that state that children aged 0 to 15 months should attend at least six well-care visits, News-Medical says.

The study found that in the Northwest region, children whose parents used the Kaiser PHR during the study period were 2.5 times more likely to bring their child to the recommended number of well-child visits. These children were also 1.2 times more likely to get all of their immunizations.

In Hawaii, meanwhile, children in this group were two times more likely to get all well-child visits, but results related to immunizations were statistically insignficant, iHealthBeat notes.

While it may be too soon to call it a trend, this is one of a growing number of projects which use the PHR concept to help patients engage and take responsibility for their health behaviors.

For example, this summer Howard University Hospital rolled out a mobile PHR for pre-diabetic young adults designed to help them take control of their health. Howard has given the young adults in the program — aged 18 to 24 and diagnosed with pre-diabetes — access to a mobile version of the NoMoreClipboard PHR for their smartphones.

The program sends a variety of text messages to the young adults targeted by this intervention, which include reminders to interact with the PHR. The program participants are also given a FitBit Zip wireless activity tracker which keeps track of steps taken, distance covered and calories burned per user.

Projects like these, which help patients make the PHR the fulcrum point for better health, are a smart way of using the technology. I expect to see a great deal more of this “PHR=patient engagement=better health” model going forward.

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

I love a lot of the stats in the whitepaper that they use to debunk the myth. For example, they say that “$42,000 could be wasted annually on paper charts.” This goes with the myth that looks at the financial sense of a paper chart system.

I found the last myth on their list really interesting: “Portability of patient records is a luxury for large practices.” I’d extend this myth to something I’ve heard some people say: “Small practices don’t need to have a portable patient record.” I’ve certainly seen those doctors who don’t want their patient data portable. In their mind they think that if the patient record can’t be accessed from home, then they won’t have to work on it from home. However, this isn’t a reality for most doctors. Ask the doctor who has to drive into their office at midnight to find a patient record if he likes the idea of a EHR software that’s easily accessed from anywhere at any time.

Mandi Bishop is a healthcare IT consultant and a hardcore data geek with a Master's in English and a passion for big data analytics, who fell in love with her PCjr at 9 when she learned to program in BASIC. Individual accountability zealot, patient engagement advocate, innovation lover and ceaseless dreamer. Relentless in pursuit of answers to the question: "How do we GET there from here?" More byte-sized commentary on Twitter: @MandiBPro.

According to Twitter analytics, one of my more engaging tweets recently stated that Meaningful Use is stifling innovation by requiring that health IT vendors and healthcare providers employ very specific tactics to capture and report on clinical data capture and interoperability standards compliance – ostensibly to engage and empower the patient, and improve coordination of care between providers. Of course, I said it much more succinctly than that. In effect, conforming to the Meaningful Use Stage 2 attestation measures is akin to “teaching to the test”:

Here’s a real-world example of what it means to “teach to the test” of Meaningful Use. In order to qualify for CMS incentive dollars, Meaningful Use Stage 2 Year 1 patient engagement measures must be met, with auditable data captured, in a 90-day contiguous period in 2014. An eligible provider (EP) must demonstrate that 50% of all patients with encounters during that time period have online access to their clinical summary within 4 days of the data becoming available to the provider. 5% of those patients must access the clinical information within the 90 days, and 5% of those patients must leverage secure messaging to communicate relevant health information with the provider. Finally, the MU-certified EMR must proffer patient-specific education materials for 10% of the patients seen during that time.

What I believe the ONC had in mind when they crafted these measures: engaged patients who will log in to their portal after each encounter, review the findings and lab results to assess their own progress and outcomes, read or listen to the condition-specific educational materials provided that resonate with them, and ask more meaningful questions of their providers as a result of this new-found, data-enabled empowerment. That is why they categorize these measures as “patient engagement”, right?

Wrong. This is what “patient engagement” looks like, from the EMR implementation, Meaningful Use-consultant, EP business process standpoint.

First, establish the bare minimum thresholds for meeting the measures. If the EP saw 1000 patients during the same 3-month period the previous year, your denominator is 1000; calculate the numerator for each measure based on that. So, we need 500 patients to have access to their clinical data online; 50 patients must access their information; 50 patients must communicate with their provider via secure messaging; 100 patient encounters must prompt specific educational opportunities.

To meet the 500 patients with online access to their clinical data, patient portal software is preloaded with patient demographic accounts, based on the registration data already available in the EMR. An enrollment request is emailed to the patient or authorized representative (assuming an email address is available in their demographic information). The EMR captures the event of sending this email, which contains the information about how to enroll and access the patient’s medical records via the portal. This measure is met, without the patient acknowledging the portal’s existing, and without any direct communication between provider and patient.

The medical records view and secure messaging measures can be met simultaneously, in a matter of days, by planning to add a few extra minutes to each encounter for 50 patients’ worth of appointments. The EMR has already triggered an email with portal enrollment information to each of the patients in the waiting room on a given day. As the medical assistant (MA) is taking vital stats, she asks whether the patient has enrolled in the portal. It’s likely the patient has not; the MA hands the patient a tablet and has him log in to his email, and walks him through the portal enrollment and initial login process. Once logged in, the MA directs the patient to click the link to view his medical record. That click is recorded, and the “view” measure is met; whether a CCD or C-CCD is actually displayed is irrelevant to the attestation data capture.

Having demonstrated how a patient can view his record, the MA then asks the patient to go into the portal’s message center, to send a test communication to the provider. The patient completes the required fields, and the MA prompts him with a generic health-related question to type into the body of the message. Once the patient hits “Send”, the event is recorded, and the “secure messaging” measure is met.

For all patients, whether portal-users or not, a new process begins when the MA finishes, the provider enters the room and begins her evaluation of each of the 100 patients required to meet the education measure. As the patient talks, the provider is clicking through EMR workflow screens, recording the encounter data. The EMR occasionally prompts with a dialogue box indicating educational materials are available for patients with this diagnosis code, or this lab result. Each dialogue box prompt is recorded by the EMR; the “patient-specific education” measure is met, whether the provider acts on the prompt and discusses or distributes the educational information or not.

To put it simply: the patient never has to log in to a portal to meet the 50% online availability requirement, they don’t have to actually view their records to meet the 5% view requirement, they don’t have to have an actual message exchange with their provider to meet the 5% communication requirement, and they don’t have to receive any tailored materials to meet the 10% education requirement. Once those clicks have been recorded, the actions never have to be repeated; meaningful and ongoing patient engagement is not needed to meet the attestation requirements and receive the incentive dollars.

In a previous post, I introduced my interpretation of the difference between the spirit and letter of the Meaningful Use “law”. By teaching to the test, we’re addressing the letter of the law, only, in its narrowest interpretation. When will we incent vendors and providers to go above and beyond and find ways to truly engage patients in meaningful ways, empowering them with accurate, timely data access and tools to analyze it?

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